This year I’m trying something a little different. I’m still not making any resolutions for the new year but I did great a few goals that I’ll be focusing on this year. In the past, resolutions haven’t worked (aside from my all-time favorite resolution to make this year better than the previous year) and unsurprisingly, large general goals haven’t worked either.

I’m usually so focused on the end game goal (say, lose 20 pounds) that I lose sight of the smaller gains I did make in the year and so when I don’t meet that goal, I’m disappointed even though I may have made a ton of smaller strides.

That’s why this year I named the game: Progress; not perfection.

Inspired by the Passion Planner, I created my own system to help define my personal goals for this year. I liked the idea of their planners but honestly, I didn’t want to feel like I had to sit and do a monthly self-reflection and write those down. So instead of shelling out the money for their planner, I purchased a Sugar Paper planner at Target (mine is black with gold dots) and created a vision board on Trello.

My Trello board is broken down into my main goals for the year (Finances, Healthy Living, Brush Lettering, Writing, and Ballet) and then smaller progress goals that will help me gauge how I’m doing in terms of achieving the main goal. This will hopefully help me to stay focused on all the steps I did accomplish en route to the main goal. If you’re interested, here’s more information on how I set up my board.

Since I’m a visual person, setting my goals in a Trello board is really making me excited, plus I can make updates on my iPad with the Trello app. The basic plan is free so I highly recommend trying it out to see if it’ll work for you!

I’m excited by my vision board this year and plan on discussing each goal in a little more detail in future posts and give you progress updates throughout the year. 2017 may not be the best in some aspects outside of my control (like, politically. Ugh) but at least I can make it great personally.

What are you looking forward to accomplishing this year? What tools are you using to accomplish your goals?